Fighting Fairly
by mew-tsubaki
Summary: Oneshot. Bishop feels at a disadvantage when she's bickering with her boys. .::Clellick::.


**Fighting Fairly**

An NCIS oneshot

by mew-tsubaki

Note: The _NCIS_ characters belong to Donald P. Bellasario, not to me. Clellick and something Super Relatable™ when your SOs have very different backgrounds from you. ;D Read, review, and enjoy!

\- ^-^3

In the break room, Bishop sank into a chair and debated sinking into her cup of coffee. And a bag of chips, but the chips would have to wait since she had no spare change for the vending machine on her at this moment.

The hubbub of fellow agents as they passed through was welcome at this point, and it drowned out two voices that she could hear from the bullpen despite the walls between them and her. Normally, she was plenty happy to hear those two voices—one deep and gentlemanly, the other rough and dangerous, both accented—but right now the sound of either grated on her nerves.

It did her no good to haul out her phone and play a match-three game to distract her. On her phone's lock screen were text reminders of both of them, and she had no energy even to read their names. Waiting here would have to do. Waiting, and breathing—in, out…in…out…

"Whoa, there," McGee said.

Bishop sat up straight and opened one eye at him, then the other with a sigh. "You don't have to look so frightened of me, Tim," she grumbled.

Some of the usual color returned to his face, and he hesitated but neared her table anyway. "You were flaring your nostrils, Ellie."

"…all right, so I might be a little ticked."

He sat down with raised eyebrows, as if to say, "A _little_ ticked?"

She settled him with a glare. "Only a little," she insisted. "And I'm not mad at you, don't worry. Kasie, Jimmy, Gibbs—they're all safe, too."

"I'd doubt Sloane's the culprit, even though she does have a way of knowing us better than we know ourselves in a way that gets under our skin." McGee blew the steam rising from his own coffee cup. "Ducky's always golden, and Vance is god around here, so…"

Bishop narrowed her eyes at him.

"I wasn't even gonna say their names, I swear," he assured her.

She crossed her arms and leaned back. "They're infuriating sometimes, you know that?"

"You say that as if I'm a stranger to Tony DiNozzo's brand of irritation."

"Yeah, but you never dated him, Ziva, or both."

"Yeah, no, thank God for that." Realizing he'd sounded a bit too relieved, he ducked his eyes. "Uh, sorry."

Bishop sighed. "Nothing to apologize for. People get under each other's skin every now and then."

McGee furrowed his brow. "Mind my asking what it was they did? Ree—_They_," he corrected with a pointed look from her, "are barely talking to each other, too."

"Well, if you _must_ know—"

"No time," Gibbs interrupted as he passed by on his way from Autopsy. He waved with a case file for them to follow him. "Got an update from Palmer. Looks like we've got four possible suspects instead of two."

Bishop and McGee exchanged a look but hopped up anyway and trotted behind the team leader. However, McGee took one step slower and motioned for Bishop to join him.

"Things aren't so bad that you can't work the case with them…right?" he tentatively asked. His eyebrows were back to occupying space on his forehead.

"…probably not," she answered.

Still, rounding the corner, Bishop wasn't certain, and her mood soured anew when Gibbs asked for Torres to pull up the DNA profiles Palmer had sent up.

Torres and Reeves accidentally caught each other's eye, and Reeves huffed where Torres practically growled as they looked away. The results were much the same when Bishop, too, mistakenly caught their gazes, but she made certain to stare them each down and make either man be the first to look away.

Gibbs and McGee did most of the discussing of the case status, though not much went in Bishop's ear—the same, she surmised, with Reeves and Torres when Gibbs broke them down into teams to round up the new cast of suspects. They all stood around dumbly, but Gibbs didn't bark at them as Kasie, with her impeccable timing, called him right then and insisted she needed him in the lab before he headed out.

That left McGee to deal with them, and he was back to raising his eyebrows, this time reprovingly and at each of his fellow agents. "Guys? You all clear on things? Bishop, you're with me; Reeves, you're with Gibbs. Torres, you're with Sloane once she emerges from her office to lend a hand." He paused and looked at each of them in turn.

Reluctantly, they all nodded. But, as Torres turned for his jacket, he groused something barely under his breath in Spanish. At the same time, Reeves muttered something about "people being barmy."

Both made Bishop grit her teeth, and she yanked her coat from the back of her chair, catching up with McGee so quickly that it nearly turned into _him_ trailing _her_.

"Gotta say, never seen all of you in such a snit," he told her once they were in the elevator.

"What kills me isn't that we're fighting. Hell, they're like this when it's just _them_ not getting along."

McGee gave her an odd look while he fixed the collar of his jacket. "The fight's not bugging you?"

"No! But do you have any idea how hard it is, the _act_ of being on the outs with them?!" Bishop gestured wildly to upstairs. "You heard them just now! Nick slips into rapid Spanish that I never catch and makes me wish I'd paid more attention to my high school Spanish classes. And Clay has his Britishisms that I can't understand for the life of me—and I watched BBC America regularly even before I knew him! What the hell is 'barmy' anyway?!"

McGee gaped at her.

"What?!"

"_That's_ what bugs you? Not fighting, but—"

"It's a language barrier, McGee!" She groaned and was happy to leave the building and grab some fresh air on the way to his car. "Whether they're fighting or we're all fighting, I can't do anything when I have no idea what the hell they're saying…! It's frustrating, to say the least."

Stunningly, McGee shrugged. "How do you guys normally get back on track?" When they both turned red in the ensuing silence, he hurried to add, "Never mind, I don't need the details."

"I've no idea how to get back at them," Bishop grumbled after he unlocked the car. They slid into their seats, her with more force than necessary.

"Do you actually want to get back at them, though? That doesn't necessarily solve a fight."

"No, but I'd like to give them a taste of their own medicine. All I've got is plain ol' American English." She glanced at him. "True, you and Delilah switch to Binary sometimes, but that's so none of the rest of us can understand you two. And that's your guys' thing."

"So, what?" McGee pulled out of the parking lot. "You're going to learn a language neither of them is sure to know?"

At that, the perfect idea clicked on in her head, and Bishop smiled for the first time since her and her boys' ridiculous argument last night. "Hey, Tim? You know Klingon, right?"

\- ^-^ 3

**XD Seems like a cliffhanger, but it's more like a preview of Clellick's assured future. *lol* I can so easily picture poor Clayton and Nick scratching their heads when she switches to Klingon—maybe even to the point where it cools things down and they p much forget about bickering. Ah, well. A silly little idea, but smthg I rly wanted to write; sometimes speaking diff languages can cause real frustration…and then it can cause antics. XD Altho I rly would hope she'd know what "barmy" means. I initially left the cause of the fight unknown because I couldn't narrow it down, but I also rather like it left unknown know that I came back to edit this before posting; let your imagination run wild! (Altho, lbr, it prolly has something to do with someone's house skills lacking, idk. XD)**

**Thanks for reading, and please review! Check out my other **_**NCIS**_** fics if you liked this.**

**-mew-tsubaki :3**


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